https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/taiwan-says-it-tried-to-warn-the-world-about-coronavirus-heres-what-it-really-knew-and-when/ar-BB14jlTX?ocid=spartandhp - https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/taiwan-says-it-tried-to-warn-the-world-about-coronavirus-heres-what-it-really-knew-and-when/ar-BB14jlTX?ocid=spartandhp

There is no surprise in that for me.  Thge WHO always waits too long to raise alarms.

That is not to say that ignoring their warnings is ever good, rather everyone should assume they are downplaying stuff and DELIBERATELY over-react.

To anyone on this site it was clear that there were problems long before WHO acted.    The owner of this site raised the pandemic level long before WHO.  There also seemed to be a few days after the conditions for a pandemic to be declared had been met, before WHO actually came out with the statement.  

One problem was that while we could see that there was a very high risk of pandemic as the virus started to spread, it also had to spread to even more countries before a pandemic could be officially called .... If I remember correctly there might of been a couple of weeks in this 'grey zone' of waiting.   It is a judgement call, but I think WHO could have been more forthcoming with their warnings in this waiting period.

However, there seemed to be many politicians who were too weak to act just on intelligence reports and who felt they needed the backing of the WHO to justify to their people the need to act to stop the virus.    

In this case I am afraid that most of our leaders (including Johnson, Trump, Putin) must be classed as being too weak to act on their own.

I disagree.  They're acting.  Even choosing non-actions.  They're just not open about their agenda.  

Technophobe wrote: There is no surprise in that for me.  Thge WHO always waits too long to raise alarms. That is not to say that ignoring their warnings is ever good, rather everyone should assume they are downplaying stuff and DELIBERATELY over-react.

Aye.  The WHO are very political....remember that they resisted identifying this as the Wuhan Virus or Chinese Virus.  They didn't want to rankle the Chinese Communist Party, who were trying to save face.  

That being said, they seem to have blown this one bigly.  We on AFT were discussing this outbreak in late December & early January 2020 - this was my first post about the situation, it looked like a corona virus to me.   If I can call this as an armchair epidemiologist, the US CDC, WHO, EU and others should have done at least as well.  Considering the global panic caused by SARS in 2003, you'd think they would have had more concern.